Gigabyte's AMD 780G board pictured

We've got a picture of Gigabyte's upcoming AMD 780G or RS780 chipset based motherboard, the MA78GM-S2H, and we've also got some details on the specifications for you. The board is crammed with features, especially when you consider its fairly small size (it is only a mATX board).

One thing that struck us is how small the heatsink is on the chipset. It is no bigger than those found on motherboards from two or three years ago, and considering that beneath it is possibly the fastet IGP to date, the heat dissipation is really impressive.

The board features HDMI, DVI and a D-sub as well as optical S/PDIF out, 7.1-channel audio, FireWire, four rear USB 2.0 ports and headers for a further eight ports, thanks to the SB700-series Southbridge and, of course, Gigabit Ethernet. It looks like an HTPC dream platform to us.

Add to this a x16 PCIe 2.0 slot, an x1 PCIe slot and two PCI slots, as well as four memory slots and five SATA connectors and you should have a pretty solid upgrade path. Even with a fairly low-end Sempron, this board should handle HD video decoding, as the chipset is supposed to take care of most of the video decoding workload.

Sadly, we won't see this chipset arrive until March, due to AMD needing some more work to tune the Hybrid CrossFire drivers, but at least there should be plenty of boards available on the launch day.